Sir – I am grateful to Mr Emlyn-Jones for his concern for my soul.

He offers a short prayer for we atheists to use on the basis that there might just be a God after all and that the safest bet is to indulge in some prayers, just for insurance purposes.

This bet was famously proposed by Pascal, but, like his eminent predecessor, he has misunderstood the true terms of the wager because there are just so many gods to choose from.

Some gods are benevolent and others viciously cruel; some exist everywhere at once and others live in specific trees or mountains; some command the entire universe and others are content to be personal or domestic gods; some are unitary and others come in large groups.

Goodness, there must be tens of thousands of them alive and kicking around the world right now, not to mention the hundreds of thousands lost in history and those yet to be invented! There just isn’t enough time in the day to have a sneaky prayer to all of them and since, as he points out, they are all ineffable and cannot be proved not to exist, which do I choose?

I suspect Mr Emlyn-Jones is thinking of the God of the Christians but, if I find myself in the after-life trembling before the vengeful Turtle God of Tuvalu, then I can’t imagine it will help me avoid eternal torture to say: “Mr Emlyn-Jones told me to worship the wrong one.” I am not a betting man but, if I were, the only safe wager seems to be to stick with the most likely truth of the matter that they are all imaginary, every last one of them.

David Dixon, Oxford